Pages

One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Friday, March 2, 2012

The Peaks?

If you know about Magnetotactic Bacteria, then you know that these bacteria live in the Oxic-anoxic zone in the sediments and to find favorable environments, they use magnetic field lines of Earth to locate themselves and find directions. If you live in sediments, it would be hard to know whether you are going up, down or any other direction so these bacteria have evolved to convert dissolved iron compounds into magnetite and store them in their magnetostomes which are used as magnetic needles like those in compasses used in orientation and finding directions. The Oxic-anoxic zone in sediments change frequently by cycle of water, seasons and influx of sediments so these bacteria need to move in order to survive...Here is a video of magnetotactic bacteria responding to changing magnetic field...(One point that I wanted you to note is the migration of whole colony by shifting magnetic field... That fits from very simple unicellular organism like those of bacteria to very complex ones like those of human... Our needs are like magnet...If there happens a big change in sphere of needs then the mass migrations are inevitable)

Unlike bacteria that respond to changing environments, humans are smart creatures and change their environments to their needs BUT it is not ideal either...In the process of changing the environments, they create new dependencies. Gold and Oil is not part of essential commodities for survival but by creating complex societies and machines to run them we are now dependent on these precious commodities.

Human populations have responded to each big breakthrough in technological, economical and social developments and have increased to reach 6 billion. Of course, this number is going to increase. It is logical to think that as population increase, the rate of consumption also increase. Until now, as the consumption has increased so is the production. That means we are living in good times. There are some ecological migrations but the still most of the migrants are those of war migrants and economical migrants and this might made this look natural to see most of efforts are linked with political and economical concerns....

There are some people who are alarming us that these good times (A balance between consumption and Production) might not go forever. Some of commodities are limited and non-renewable so expecting to increase in their production forever is not logical and they predict a peak for production beyond which the productions won't be able to meet the supply demand...

Peak Gold might not be as serious as Peak oil but still it would affect the way people think of economy and their personal savings. My concern is not whether Peak oil or Peak gold are real or myths but of coming more Peaks. Perhaps our next talks be about "Peak Food", "Peak Fresh Water", "Peak Land" and so forth. Although human have faced famines and other ecological disasters in past but in global world where interdependence are rapidly growing, the ecological disasters and migrations are something totally new that yet we may have to discover their scales and impacts....

This report belongs to 2009 but still it shows the renewed interest in gold. If we really have reached Peak Gold then gold will be the next big player in social stratification assuming that the prices will continue to climb up, especially in societies where Gold is an important part of social events (especially marriages)